


The nuclear, the Rose and the Wasteland

by Cynine



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Brotherly Bonding, Character Death, Enemy Lovers, Forbidden Love, Gellert Grindelwald Being an Asshole, Good Albus Dumbledore, Love/Hate, M/M, Nuclear Warfare, Nuclear Winter, Older Characters, Theseus Scamander is a Good Sibling, War, War Crimes, War with Grindelwald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27667337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cynine/pseuds/Cynine
Summary: An elderly exile crosses the moors to offer a rose to an old lover's gravestone.Fifty years after the war, Grindelwald learned of Dumbledore's death from Newt.He ended his exile.（About nuclear war, exiles, war criminals and the new world.）
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Gellert Grindelwald, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, Newt Scamander & Theseus Scamander, Newt Scamander/Theseus Scamander
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15
Collections: Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, Albus x Gellert, GGAD(HP)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am not a native speaker of English and I translate my articles into English.  
> It may not be perfect and I hope you can point out my language problems.  
> In the meantime, this is a slow-paced story that requires patience to read.

01

The wind blows from a great distance, and the salt and cold of the Arctic Ocean are in the air，in just the right way, unlike the smell of soil, which is wet, cold, and hard, so that no green plants or flowers can grow on it, and it barely smells of life.

The greyish-yellow weeds are no more than knee-bones, spreading over every inch of barren soil as far as the eye can see, with no dew and no moonlight, their dried stems and leaves stuck in the earth like the skeletons of ancient creatures standing, lifeless but still sharp.

The old man walks in the wilderness, and he does walk, but he only walks. I prefer to think of him as a puppet infected with the walking virus, walking alone in this meaningless space, rather than as a living thing.

I guess he's an exile, after all, it's a place where no one but the man who wears the sin sets foot.

02

When a war ends with the explosion of a nuclear bomb, it doesn't matter which side wins.

After all, too many people have died. Too many people feel the same emotions of sacrifice, betrayal, and separation, and they are difficult for them to devote much emotion or energy to anything else, or they are too weak to go into detail and add to the grief.

So the best way to deal with war criminals in exile.

From the marshal down to the pawn, stripped of their uniforms, in a land of nothing, they are all the same.

To spend the time of their lives in the company of a long winter and unseen tombs, on their own, is excellent salvation or an unexpected consequence for the war criminal, but in the eyes of the victor, such punishment is also sufficient.

03

Exile is not a punishment at all, time is. The time to torment anyone, and for most war criminals half a century is enough to wear out a life.

Gellert Grindelwald was the last man standing.

He lived for almost fifty years in a land where there was no hope.

Fifty years is half a lifetime for some people or a lifetime for some short-lived ghosts. To exaggerate, it's even the next life of a life lost in that war.

He was not young when he came here, his black hair had lost its white, and from a distance, it was grey, a lighter shade than the exposed rocks, and white when it snowed and particles of snow seeped into his hair.

At that time he was too quiet, like most senior officers who can't accept reality and some choose to commit suicide. He thought he would end his own life instead of being in such a wilderness, self-imprisoned.

But he didn't kill himself, he just killed his own words.

In the years immediately after he arrived in exile, the low ranking soldiers thought he was mute. Most of the time, he sat on the land to be cultivated, his half-used shoes knocking into the dry soil, letting small gravels leave scratches on them.

He likes to look out into the distance, but in this part of the world there is nothing to see, especially as there are seven months of winter in the year, and most of the winter is snowy, and the winter on the moor is nothing more than old snow-covered with new snow, layer upon layer. When the snow falls, one cannot even see oneself.

In the quiet years, he always imagined a white tower in the distance, above all the ruins.

He sometimes tries to draw the tower.

On snowy nights, most exiles choose to curl up on their couch with all the blankets wrapped around them, and occasionally some exiles who has found a way in will pour hard-won vodka into their mouth. Sometimes they get drunk and then speak in a language he doesn't understand, those who aren't drunk join them, they share the drink or the temperature, the foam sticks to their beards and forms tiny droplets, finally, they fall head over heels on the bed, crushing the old iron bed with their voices.

They talk about women, wives, and sex, just as they talk about the style of pistol and the type of bullets, but not every gun comes with only one type of bullet. They begin to reminisce about the dogs and brands of cigarettes, the softness of white bread, and the taste of coffee in their homeland and then sigh with nostalgia or regret.

The sound of snow falling is inaudible, but the wind is clear enough that the fire burns stubbornly, sparks exploding intermittently and making a continuous sound. The air smells of alcohol and ashes, which is warm, but not warm enough on most nights.

Gellert likes to sit by the fire on nights like this and draw the white tower, the unseen white tower, in the dim light of the fire.

He held a pencil that had been turned out of nowhere and was only about three knuckles long. The graphite ink sticks to his fingers, the flat, bald nib rubbing against the old paper, tangled between the textures of the fibers.

He knew there was a white tower like that, but he couldn't draw it. He could only stare quietly, at the things he could not see.

This is how exiles used to describe him as a silent artist.

04

But it had been too long for him to remain completely silent, and around the eighth or perhaps the tenth year of his arrival, he began to ramble on about things that bystanders didn't care to hear.

The nuclear ruins are thirty miles away in what used to be a village, and over the years a succession of daring exiles have ventured out into the forbidden land. They begun to deliberately avoid the question of radiation in comparison to the looming cold.

Ten years were not enough.

Gellert traded his pocket watch for a book of poetry and half a bottle of red ink plucked from the ruins by other exiles.

He has aged far too quickly in the intervening years, his hair, which has not yet had time to turn grey, is falling out a little, and frosty folds of chaparral are spreading across his skin. It's almost impossible to maintain a refined life in a place like this, where even life is a struggle to get by.

He begins to read some poems as he sits on the land looking up at the White Tower.

He doesn't know what the poems are about. They could be about celebrating life, living, or peace, or they could be about some useless love affair. He guessed the pronunciation of the words on the paper, then pieced them together into phrases and spoke them to connect them, even though he didn't know the language.

Without a pocket watch, he can't know exactly how much time has passed, perhaps because his flesh has begun to decay and he is no longer sensitive to time. In his youth, he felt that a moment's communication with fools was a waste of life, but now he chooses to look back quietly on the folly of the past.

He began to feel like Sergeant Scamander's hound, sitting in the same place most of the time, stubbornly nostalgic for the taste of a certain bone. He was always lying in the sunset, letting tiny bits of sunlight stream through his fur, then waiting for the moon to come.

Then the dog died on a rainy morning.

Gellert saw the shadow of a bird hovering by the white tower.

05

Once again, he heard from Albus Dumbledore when the inspectors came.

They still praise the hero for how he broke up the enemy's plots, again and again. Though the great Dumbledore seems to be troubled by a new enemy.

"Of course he'll win, he won't lose to anyone after that summer," Gellert said to himself.

It occurred to him that in the eyes of the inspectors, he was just one of the millions of enemies they spoke of, perhaps once the most threatening, but essentially the same.

A defeated enemy, or Albus Dumbledore's adversary for the first half of his life.

In the summertime on the moor, the grass grows a little taller than usual and occasionally there are scattered flowers in the bushes, but they are the size of fingernails and live and die.

It was a land that could not cling to any long-lived life.

There are less than half a dozen exiles left who came to this land. They became like old wooden stakes set up in a wasteland, puppets with a hollowed-out core.

Or rather, they no longer resemble creatures like a man.

Little by little, gravestones are erected on the moor, where the tundra is hard and extremely difficult to excavate, and people are buried under a foot of earth, and then a stone is placed on the surface.

This completes the 'tomb'.

It was only when the first stone was erected that they spent their seventh night on the moor. Today, Gellert has lost count of the number of stones that have been erected here. The tremor in his steps as he passes by the graveyard can easily be felt underground.

Death is so close to him, a mere distance from the soil, the grass, and the broken stones.

And yet he lived long enough.

——TBC——


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An elderly exile crosses the moors to offer a rose to an old lover's gravestone.  
> Fifty years after the war, Grindelwald learned of Dumbledore's death from Newt. He ended his exile.  
> （About nuclear war, exiles, war criminals and the new world.）

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I write in Chinese, I use some very complex rhetorical devices, which make it look like an essay. No doubt this makes it more difficult to translate and makes the text less readable.  
> I wanted to describe how Dumbledore, Grindelwald and Newt had to reconcile themselves over the years, which is more difficult to do than forgetting love.  
> I have devoted a lot of space to their inner workings and I have made some very subtle references to the emotional relationship of the Scamander brothers.  
> I hope you will enjoy this story.

06

By the time there were only ten or so people left in the exile, about thirty years had passed.

Eighteen kilometers away from the exile, there is a modest lake that is covered with ice for seven months of the year. Once upon a time, there were fishes swimming there, their tail fins sweeping over the water plants, beating like the heart of the earth under the December ice. But now there are no fish and no water plants, just an empty, hollowed-out area of ice and skeletons.

The nuclear-soaked wilderness accelerates the flow of all life's growth towards death. Gellert had made death, he had ignited the bomb, like Pandora opening her box, and all the evils of catastrophe, pain, and disease had come crashing down on him. But then death had made him and he was trapped in the land, staring at the box. Pandora left hope in the box, so hope never came in.

Hope never comes, it hangs over everyone’s head, sometimes it's a big, full moon. Sometimes it's a neck rope. The difference is that some people gaze at the moon and die, while others choose to walk towards the rope themselves.

Gellert was different, the box was in his hand and he stood his ground.

07

He slowly regained his emotions, first with eternal regret, then with anger, and finally with sadness.

He began to hate Albus, he has a gnawing hate Albus for abandoning him here, like forgetting a love letter from his youth or removing a piece of shrapnel stuck in his ribcage.

He began to sit in his hut on snowy nights, silently cursing Albus, wishing the great Marshal Dumbledore no peace, but he also wanted Albus to be trapped in a life of boredom and tedium. So that they could be the only enemies in each other's lives.

Gellert could accept any punishment Albus could inflict on him - executions, beatings, even a public trial - but he could not accept being forgotten like this.

If they were the end of a legend, it would be a tragic enough ending, tragic and clichéd as most stories of the triumph of good over evil are.

The smell of alcohol permeates the cabin and Gellert opens a bottle of expired vodka.

He had found a whole case of vodka under the bed of one of the exiles at the time of his death - the date of manufacture was just before the end of the war. The young soldiers, unaccountably exiled, worshipped the great leader Grindelwald, calling out that they would give their lives for Grindelwald, convinced that they would die for their faith, but they did not know Grindelwald's face or name, or even that his former name was Gellert.

Little by little, the once-young soldiers grew older, in the freezing wasteland, from living flesh to dead souls, they began to die slowly, with them the sins of the innocent.

Death is not an instant here, but a respite from every sunrise and moonset.

The taste of aged vodka is not pure, and Gellert does not try to drink it, he just opens one of the bottles and lets the fumes spread through the air, then he sits down on the iron-framed bed. He acts as a sober drunk.

The white tower had never looked so sober to him, even more so than the scattered ruins in the distance. It took him thirty years to see the white tower in all that glittering landscape.

He sometimes wondered, with malice. If the old Dumbledore was as ugly as he was now? His face was wrinkled, his red hair had turned the color of death, his eyes were cloudy like a lake contaminated by nuclear waste, and his flesh had been pulled into strange lines that made it impossible to see his original bones.

He began to think of Dumbledore's face, the seventeen-year-old Albus, a human reflection of Adonis, beauty and sin mingling in his body in a magnificent fragrance. No one could fail to fall in love with him, just as no one could fail to fall in love with a rose. At least at some point in their lives, or at some moment when the sun shines and the petals fall, there is always a moment when love comes to one's heart.

Gellert tries to remember that moment, he tries to remember the moment he fell in love, and then he begins to frantically deny that he is not in love with Albus Dumbledore.

He was not in love with him, not on every summer night when the beetles traveled through the earth and under his fingers, not on every day when the sun swam freely, not on every hour when the cicadas chirped or the apples blossomed in the rainy season. 

He had never loved him.

The smell of wine and the fire smothered Gellert's face in flushes, the smoke of burning wood gave him a headache, and he began to cough violently, shrinking into a ball and touching his damp cheeks with reddened fingers, trying to cool his skin.

He muttered a couple of obscenities, not sure if he was cursing himself or his enemies.

08

Colonel Scamander appeared in exile quietly in the forty-eighth year of the war.

By then Newt Scamander was so old that he had to walk with the aid of a cane, and once he was a hero of the war, but even then he was only a colonel for the rest of his life.

Nobody cared about the exiles long ago, not even the history books bothered to describe them.

Many years ago, Mr. Newt Scamander sat opposite Grindelwald in what was purely a confrontation between junior and senior men. But now they are too old, and the two dying old men sit opposite each other, cutting nearly twenty years extremely short, with only a Dumbledore between them.

"Colonel Scamander," said Grindelwald, sitting in a chair on one side of the table, straightening as best he could, and he put on a smile polite enough for the man opposite him, "have you come to see me breathe my last? Then you might have to wait a few months."

"The winters are a bit harder here, and I guess I shouldn't die in the summer when the weather is still nice."

Scamander wasn't smiling, he used to always have a shy smile on his face, but obviously, it was a bit difficult for him to pull facial muscles like that now.

"Grindelwald." He called him by that name again.

He looked into Grindelwald's eyes and tried to focus, trying to look more serious so he could see Grindelwald's face.

"Mr. Dumbledore passed away." Scamander chewed the words with an effort, trying to make his spitting clearer.

Grindelwald's breathing paused, he was still in the same position he had been in, and there was a glimmer of light drifting across his pupils.

"This isn't exactly news, Colonel." Grindelwald lowered his voice, trying to maintain a sarcastic tone, "People die when they're old, and the great Marshal Dumbledore is no exception."

"If I'm not mistaken, that one Mr. Scamander should-" Grindelwald stopped, he hadn't spoken to anyone for so long that he couldn't get a precise word out of his head.

Colonel Scamander whispered a warning: "Grindelwald!"

He struck the ground hard with his cane, which made him look even angrier.

Grindelwald's gaze has grown wry, a look that Scamander knows all too well. At the negotiating table of the nuclear war agreement, he too had made such a face, but it was clear that Grindelwald and Scamander were no longer the same people at the negotiating table.

"You are responsible for their deaths." Colonel Scamander's eyes crawled with blood, "He died because of nuclear contamination."

"That's why you chose Miss Tina." Grindelwald made a laughing sound, like the dry squeak of an old wooden door from friction, "Newt, does Mrs. Scamander know? Something about you falling in love with another Scamander."

"All of this is...it's all nonsense."

"Come on, you should be more honest in this place where God can't see," Grindelwald continued, "God is not going to keep the people's war hero Newton Artemis Fido Scamander out of heaven just because he had a platonic incest."

"It's no surprise that Artemis fell in love with his brother." Grindelwald was gradually finding his words, and he was well versed in the matter of ridicule.

"Enough! Grindelwald!" Colonel Scamander shouted at him, his beard almost stained with spittle and shaking slightly in the air.

"It's been almost fifty years, Theseus he's been dead for almost fifty years!"

"You know, how I wish my children had grey-blue eyes, but they don't, they all have eyes like fire lizards." Colonel Scamander tilted his head, his whole body shaking, the wrinkles in his eyes twisted into a strange curve, but he chose to remain silent.

"Albus he's dead too." Grindelwald bowed his head, his rough fingertips hooking mindlessly over the hem of his coat, "How did he take his last breath in his soft bed?"

Colonel Scamander turned his eyes slowly towards him, and the air seemed to turn solid, burying them in transparent soil, almost suffocating them.

"It's murder." Colonel Scamander said, gesturing for a gun, looking at his fingers again and firing an unseen shot into the open air outside the window, "like this, one shot that kills."

The muscles at the corners of Grindelwald's mouth twitched slightly, a look of incredulity wavered across his face for a moment, and after about a few seconds, or maybe half a minute, he suddenly burst out laughing madly, his voice a shrill hiss like a scratched vinyl record. He slid from his chair to the floor, grabbed the foot of the table with a death grip, and laughed so hard he couldn't straighten up.

Halfway through the laugh, his voice turned to cough and dry heaves, his breath went wild, his nose lost its rhythm, and it was as if all the laughing he hadn't done in nearly fifty years had been drained away at this moment.

Colonel Scamander looked at him, but there was nothing in his eyes, he just looked at him, that was all.

It took Grindelwald a long time to catch his breath, he managed to get up from the floor, held onto the corner of the table, and asked Scamander condescendingly, "Did he ask you to come and inform me of his death?"

"Yes." Colonel Scamander said to him.

"Poor Mr. Scamander." Grindelwald said, "was Dumbledore's stooge all his life."

"He died in the Dungeon Riot? Or is it a revolution in the academy? Or was it just an accident?" Grindelwald began to chatter, "The history books will surely describe this as a grand accident.

"Oh, dear! I can't believe I have no place in this grand accident." Grindelwald became agitated, his hands began to tremble uncontrollably, his pupils narrowed and even his voice became high-pitched.

"I should have killed him back then! Field Marshal Grindelwald shot the rebel Dumbledore in 1945! This is how it should have ended!"

"This old..."

"He died at the hands of a traitor." Colonel Scamander interrupted Grindelwald's shouting, which instantly calmed him down. He sat down slowly and curled up in the corner of the chair against the armrest, like an intermittent mental patient who has suddenly returned to normal after a complete breakdown.

"Most deaths are not what we think they are." Colonel Scamander lowered his eyelids and looked at his hands.

"When I was under thirty, I thought I'd die a martyr and then Theseus might hug my tombstone."

"The truth is that we were quite wrong about all of that."

"But it's not hard to accept, is it?"

Colonel Scamander told Grindelwald: "You'll at least get to see him one more time."

"Field Marshal Dumbledore's tombstone should be admired by thousands of people, but I guess the infamous war criminal Grindelwald wasn't among those people."

"By his wishes, his tombstone was built on the divide of the moor. A small piece of marble, no name, no pattern." Scamander explained, "They say Dumbledore was to warn the exiles on the moors."

"But I guess not."

"He probably just wanted to watch you."

"Watching me go to hell?" Grindelwald had a substantial smile on his face, "I didn't want to see him."

The silence in the dilapidated cabin was dreadful, the cold seeping through the damp floor of the cabin and freezing Colonel Scamander's legs. He rose slowly, moving his knees, then walked to Grindelwald on crutches.

"I respect your choice."

"I hope you don't regret it."

Colonel Scamander sighed, "Love and regret are always slower to come than hate."

\--TBC--.


	3. Chapter 3 --The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An elderly exile crosses the moors to offer a rose to an old lover's gravestone.  
> Fifty years after the war, Grindelwald learned of Dumbledore's death from Newt.   
> He ended his exile.  
> （About nuclear war, exiles, war criminals and the new world.）

09

Scamander stood by the door and he prolonged the word leave to the utmost, but Gellert did not get up.

"I'm leaving." Colonel Scamander said to him. Out of courtesy he should have said something nice or wished him well before he left, but he thought long and hard about it. He thought that all the positive words were too ironic at this moment.

Farewells are a wonderful act, and when he was eight years old, his farewell to Theseus was a hug, but in the end, he said goodbye with a tear.

Later, all goodbyes were long and silent, as no words or emotions could end their lives on their behalf.

"This must be the last time," Scamander suddenly wonders if Grindelwald back then could have realised his farewell to Dumbledore. That obscure farewell tear their overwordy timeline.

When he decided to step out of the door, Grindelwald asked him a question in the silence.

"How do they record his life, in a book, or in a eulogy?"

Scamander turned his head slowly away from the door, the easterly breeze coming through from the distance disturbed the original order of the air, but he didn't look at Grindelwald and replied.

"It appears on the same page as your name."

"But the sentences are too long, they're not on a line."

Scamander thought he heard Grindelwald's sigh.

"I'm sorry." Grindelwald lowered his head.

10

Gellert watched Scamander leave, the tyres of the heavy vehicle crushing against the fragile roots of the plants, the weeds splitting their path like a Moses parting the sea, like a soft flannel fabric abruptly outlined with fingertip scratches.

He sits on a wooden bench, just sits, then breathes, without looking, almost melting into the soil, into a lifeless solid.

He begins to search his memory for something alive, something vivid, something that still leads his heart to beat. So many themes related to death hovered over his life, nuclear, wilderness, and war, that it became almost a leitmotif of his life.

There is a rose that blooms in all seasons. Like the bottle of red ink that had dried up, it burned red as if it were trying to turn everything around it into a passionate flame with it.

He had not time to kill Field Marshal Dumbledore, just as Albus had not had time to kill him.

The decadent moonlight cuts through the carved marble columns, leaving a streak of dead grey soaked white in the cloisters. Roses in a vase made of porcelain render the austerity in the air with just the right amount of ambiguity.

Such a scene would be suitable for Salome, or Coriolanus.

Albus just looks at him, his eyes always shining with sensible tenderness, and then mirrors Gellert's reflection.

"We should end this."

"You can kill me, just like you killed Arianna or anyone else," Gellert said to him, "There is no difference."

"Yes, there is no difference," Albus said, "You've always known that there is no difference."

"Love or anything else, it does nothing for our lives." Gellert looked to Albus, looking frank, "It just wastes."

Albus's muzzle is pointed at Gellert, and in a moment, perhaps seconds, a red more intense than a rose may appear, burning away more of the overpowering love.

"Stop in time,"

Albus said, closing his eyes, "You always say it's for the greater good."

"But I've never liked those things." He said to him, the moon streaming down a cold hue in his eyes.

"It hurts too much."

The delicately carved pistol was trembling in Albus's hand, and the only bullet in the gun hesitated where it would always end up in one of the directions it was meant to go.

Gellert thought he should have pulled out of this youthful farce earlier, as he said - in time to stop it, but it wasn't easy.

"Boom."

The bullet didn't kill anyone, the pistol was aimed at his chest, but ended up shooting at the rose in the corner, leaving a trail of shattered red. The sweet smell of smoke telling of the inevitable waste, and the gradual fall of petals turning back every hour of the past.

For a long time, Gellert felt more love between them than between any two creatures in the world. A love that was so shocking that, like an exploding nuclear bomb, it melted everything around it, covering the sky with dust and making it impossible to see where it stood. It is hot and destructive, a once-in-a-millennium passion and lingering, like two similar atomic nuclei meeting, they don't indulge in an orbit around each other, they just collide and then incinerate everything in harmony, finally becoming two particles of dust that are not quite the same, each going their own way.

In the end, their love dies instead of them.

11

It was only when he rose up determined to get out of the moors that he understood love and regret.

He didn't want to see Marshal Dumbledore's grave, but he had a rose that he hadn't been able to give away, stuck one summer, and now he should take that flower out and return it to where it belonged.

He was going to return that rose.

Eventually, he stepped out of his cottage, the cool summer breeze sweeping through the doorway, waving the grass clippings on the cottage in the air, and picked up the wooden pole in the doorway to act as a walking stick. There were crumbs of the earth in the cracks of the pole and two ants travelling through them, and he blew his breath in an attempt to blow the ants away. But it was clear that he had failed, he had to knock the pole hard on the ground.

When he had done so, he looked up and began to look in the direction of the white tower, but he could not see the white tower as he saw the rolling meadows and the endless sky, the sheltering pallor penetrating little by little into the whole firmament from the farthest point, plain to the point of dullness.

"So this is it." He said to himself.

So this was an exile he had made of himself.

He says goodbye with a neatly arranged stone in the distance. The air is still dry, but not cold, and the sun is an old golden colour, softer than the snow, which is a good day.

He walks slowly, one footstep at a time, so slowly that he has to raise his knee when he steps because of the weeds, then move his weight to the other leg and repeat the motion, but it looks exaggerated and awkward like he is wading through a river in the grass.

The mechanical repetition of the step, his toes slicing through the roots, reminds him of his youth, when he used to wander aimlessly through the valley. The grass was greener there, the stems were softer and the flowers were in full bloom. He had rolled in the grass like that and kissed his lover there too.

"Lover." He thought again of Albus, the red-haired Albus, like a rose.

He walked on, tiny flying insects buzzing in his ears. For the first time, he knew that there was such active life in the moors. He had given Albus a beetle, the size of a finger, with colourful, oily wings. It is an excuse to strike up a conversation between the two boys at the start of their story. But apparently, there were no beetles on the moors, there were beings more silent than beetles. Presumably, some creatures can never be tamed, and the beetle died after living for five days in a glass jar. Gellert thought a beetle would be happy to die in the summer, so he made a specimen of it, freezing him forever in the happiest season, which was almost one of his few mercies.

Now, he feels as if he were an aged beetle, unable to find the season of death. He had told Scamander he would not die this summer, but he had died one summer, many years ago, and then wandered through the endless winter.

The sun was dark, the cold conditioning was slowly settling from the sky, the weeds on the ground were still warm from the dry heat, and the insects were calming down and beginning to search for their southern home.

He looked forward and saw the vague remains of nuclear debris.

Holding his knees to catch his breath, he tries to find a rock to sit on, but there aren't many rocks on the moor and it's not like he's wasting his time, so he sits down. He took out dried food, all food here has both hard and cold qualities, meat or otherwise, and he didn't have many teeth left. He had to tear the dried meat into very thin strips and chew them slowly in his mouth. There wasn't enough food to go around, and he only had enough for a one-way trip, but he knew he would only need about that much.

The morning on the moor was peaceful, with a slow and gentle rise of the sun, a faint warmth of the morning breeze when there was no sun, and the salty, clean smell of the salt lake.

The wind reminds him of places further afield where there is always an endless wind. He misses the autumn leaves as much as he misses the birdsong in the wind and the sound of falling apples. In most places, the smell of the morning breeze is a mixed bag. It may have the stench of sheep dung, but it can also be tantalisingly musky. It is the fumes of bacon baking and the freshness of mint-flavoured toothpaste. 

He also learnt to miss the damp streets of London and the continuous rainy season, or the vibrant expressions of men playing violins and wandering dancers in the streets of Paris, or the whisky in the bar that was sweeter than vodka.

He began to resign himself to a life on the moors, with their uniform east wind and lacklustre snow and roads with no end in sight, which was enough to drive an old man mad the moment he came to life.

He couldn't even imagine how he had spent half a century, and he began to curse himself for his own stupidity and insensitivity, which he should have understood much sooner instead of wasting many years.

12

On the morning of the third day, Gellert arrived at the nuclear ruins, halfway to the border of the wasteland, but he felt he could take no further step forward.

The sky was black, even the light was damp with a grey tinge, and the clouds in the distance were like the furrows of an old chapter of the constitution, with yellow-brown mould patches that he knew were the harbingers of a storm.

The wreckage of buildings was a charred black colour, some white, and near the ground, there were ruins and traces of green moss that had survived. He had never seen this before, he never knew what the place would be like after the explosion of a nuclear bomb. He thought there was nothingness behind the heat and splendour. The theory was that the temperature of nuclear fission would melt everything, so he never thought about what was left above the ruins.

Twenty metres of steel lay in front of him, twisted and bent in strange curves. The rusty tips crumbling like the stems and leaves of a slowly fading rose, the red of rust in its charcoal-black crust.

The grey-black clouds rolled with white light and a sound as low as the whimpering of a wolf, surging slowly above him as if everything connected with the origin of life were pouring out of the canopy. The same life, love and death, eternal or extinct, all descend in a place where the gods never visit.

The first thunder rang out with a roar loud enough to make the sand beneath his feet tremble, and he felt his skull receive the frequency of the pathos of the land.

It was an astonishing sight, and any life would have crawled at its feet. Lightning struck the tallest wreck in the ruins, and in a split second white light enveloped the surroundings, like the arrival of a god. It took him a long time to see the wreckage of what could not be called a building - a tower, a tower that was white as lightning.

The thunder fades, the rain pours down, and the sky is the colour of lime and the Victorian Thames. Gellert lost the strength in his knees, his muscles were no longer strong enough to tense. The rain beat down on his back, he let go of the stick and knelt in the endless moor.

The weeds were bent an inch by the rain, falling neatly in one direction. They were no longer dry, but still yellow.

To hell with it, thought Garrett, he was going to rot in his own grave with the roses.

His mind began to flash with useless images, bright red, all sorts of reds stirred together, he saw his mother, his soldiers, the exiles, and those he had killed.

Finally, he saw Albus Dumbledore, who was as old as he was. Little by little wrinkles spread from the corners of his eyes, just as he had imagined, but not quite the same.

The light began to fade from his eyes and he became so light that he could run on the grass, so he kept running backwards, moment by moment until the years turned back.

13

"Dear Albus.

Nothing is immortal, and neither love is.

But even when roses rot, buildings crumble and time fades.

Our love is riddled with holes and falling to dust.

It is old and useless, but it loves you as it was."

So wrote Gellert Grindelwald, seventeen, in his first love letter to Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

\--END--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Chinese version of this article was drafted in February 2019 and took two months to write.  
> February 2020 is a disaster for the Chinese fanfiction community, and also for creators. In the past few years, I have tried to write original novels as well as fanfiction writing. But the censorship system has become stricter and stricter, and the subject matter of the novels has become more and more limited. As an author who is unknown, I am losing readers.  
> I was forced to take the path of translation. Admittedly it is a great blessing to be able to write in native language, but I have to give something up if I want to express myself more freely.  
> Biding my time and translating my previous work is what I can do for now. I want my stories to be seen by more people.


End file.
